Take the ideas or categories of the necessary, the perfect, the universal, the infinite, the perfect, the immutable, the eternal. These ideas, it is willingly conceded, never exist in the human mind, or are never thought, without their opposites, the contingent, the finite, the imperfect, the particular, the variable, the temporal; but they do not, even in our thought, depend on them, and are not derived or derivable from them by abstraction or generalization. Take the synthetic judgment instanced by Kant, Everything that begins to exist must have a cause. The idea of cause itself, Hume has shown, is not derivable from any fact of experience, and Reid and Kant say the same. The notion we have of power which founds the relation of cause and effect, or that what we call the cause actually produces or places the effect, these philosophers tell us, is not an object of experience, and is not obtainable from any empirical facts. {154} Experience gives only the relation of what we call cause and effect in time, that is, the relation of antecedence and consequence. Main de Biran and Victor Cousin, it is true, deny this, and maintain that the idea of cause is derived from the acts of our own will, which we are conscious of in ourselves, and which not merely precede their effects, but actually produce them. I will to raise my arm, and even if my arm be paralytic or held down by a [force] stronger than I, so that I cannot raise it, I still by willing produce an effect, the volition to raise it, which is none the less real because, owing to external circumstances not under my control, it does not pass beyond my own interior. But even granting this, how from this particular act of causation conclude universal cause, or even from universal cause necessary cause? I by willing produce the volition to raise my arm, therefore everything that begins to exist must have a cause. The argument from the particular to the universal, _non volet_, say the logicians, and still less the argument from the contingent to the necessary. Take the idea of the perfect. That we have the idea or category in the mind is indisputable, and it evidently is not derivable by abstraction or generalization from the facts of experience. We have experience only of imperfect things, and no generalizing of imperfection can give perfection. Indeed, without the category of the perfect, the imperfect cannot even be thought. We think a thing imperfect, that is, judge it to be imperfect--and every thought is a judgment, and contains an affirmation--because it falls short of the ideal standard with which the mind compares it. The universal is not derivable from the particular, for the particular is not conceivable without the universal. We may say the same of the immutable, the eternal, the infinite, the one, or unity.